It's two in the afternoon and thirty-four degrees
Actually the temperature crashed by a solid thirty degrees Fahrenheit and with any luck will stay this moderately cool and dampish until everyone has rehydrated. Or we could just skip the next heat dome entirely.
I had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).
The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.
Because I had showedspatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).
I had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway,
spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.
Because I had showed
spatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).
no subject
Other than the covers of my Mum's books (I didn't think much of him there; the Poldark TV ins chose very unflattering shots), I first saw him properly as Essex in Elizabeth R (so add another century to the count), and he impressed me enough that I gave in and watched my mum's TV show that she'd been going on about. So, then Poldark; also Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Moonstone (1972) with Martin Jarvis (RE as Franklin Blake, MJ as Godfrey Ablewhite) & as Edward Ferrars in the 1971 Sense & Sensibility. Oh, and he was Helena Bonham-Carter's father in A Dark Adapted Eye (one of those 90s Barbara Vine Mysteries we were talking about a little while ago) & he popped back up briefly in 2015's Poldark as another character. Like most people I take an interest in, he once played opposite Suzanne Neve, but not in a thing I can have.
no subject
I am glad he was much improved when not on a book cover.
The Moonstone (1972) with Martin Jarvis (RE as Franklin Blake, MJ as Godfrey Ablewhite
I am afraid that would be the one I didn't watch because it didn't have Anton Lessser as Ezra Jennings, but I can keep it in mind!
Oh, and he was Helena Bonham-Carter's father in A Dark Adapted Eye (one of those 90s Barbara Vine Mysteries we were talking about a little while ago)
Nice.
Like most people I take an interest in, he once played opposite Suzanne Neve, but not in a thing I can have.
Availability or content? Condolences either way.
no subject
Having watched both (although that one not since it aired back in the day), I don't think they are mutually exclusive! I enjoyed them both anyway.
Availability or content? Condolences either way.
Late 60s/early 70s BBC status as to burninated or just unreleased unknown as usual. (Bel Ami, anyway; so as not to be needlessly mysterious.)
<3